Basic Information
- Type of Place
- Independent City or Town
- Metro Area
- Politics c. 1860?
- Unions, Organized Labor?
Sundown Town Status
- Sundown Town in the Past?
- Unlikely
- Was there an ordinance?
- Sign?
- Year of Greatest Interest
- Still Sundown?
- Surely Not
Census Information
| Total | White | Black | Asian | Native | Hispanic | Other | BHshld | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1860 | ||||||||
| 1870 | ||||||||
| 1880 | ||||||||
| 1890 | ||||||||
| 1900 | ||||||||
| 1910 | 14548 | 5434 | ||||||
| 1920 | 15203 | 5000 | ||||||
| 1930 | ||||||||
| 1940 | ||||||||
| 1950 | ||||||||
| 1960 | ||||||||
| 1970 | ||||||||
| 1980 | ||||||||
| 1990 | 4846 | |||||||
| 2000 | 3632 | 1305 | 2241 | |||||
| 2010 | ||||||||
| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
Main Ethnic Group(s)
Group(s) Excluded
Comments
In 1880, each of Cairo’s wards had 35-57% black households. Little segregation, then, by ward. “By 1915 this process had come to a halt and the integrated society that had accompanied the urbanization of Cairo was gone.” Now one ward was 66.3% black and two others were only about 16% black.
“In 1880 nearly a third of all south Cairo white residents had lived next door to black households; in 1915 fewer than one in ten white households in the whole city had black neighbors.” Many blacks now lived outside CAIro’s city limits, to the N, “in an almost totally black subdivisioin, appropriately named Future City.”
Cairo High School desegregated in 1968. Some whites pulled out to a private academy, “Camelot,” but it closed in 1986. Between 1968-72, no teams would play in Cairo, fearing the violence (which did occur, between blacks and whites in Cairo).
Bad things also happened when predominantly Black Cairo teams played in sundown towns like Anna.